Lack of portfolio visibility: thirty-eight green projects and four in trouble

Forty projects on one slide

The portfolio review opened with a familiar slide: forty projects, thirty-eight green and two amber. It looked like a healthy portfolio. The new head of the PMO asked a simple question: which three projects are in trouble? Nobody in the room could answer with confidence.

The person who saw it first

Hassan, the new PMO head, looked at how the colours were made. Every status was typed by hand, a week old by the time it reached the slide, and written by the person who would be blamed if it turned red. The slide was a collection of opinions.

He changed where the colour came from. Status stopped being an opinion and became the sum of the work: tasks done, tasks late, hours spent against the plan. The next review showed four projects in trouble, not two. Two of them were rescued that quarter, because the warning arrived in the second month instead of the sixth.

The textbook name: lack of portfolio visibility

Lack of portfolio visibility is the state in which leadership sees reports about the work rather than the work itself. Its symptoms are familiar: status reports that are always green until they are suddenly red, surprises at the end of a quarter, and decisions about funding and people made on numbers nobody can trace.

Its cause is structural. When progress is reported upward by hand, every level adds delay and optimism. The further a number travels from the work, the less it says about the work.

Signs to watch for

Look at the history of your status colours. If projects stay green for months and then jump straight to red, the colours were not measuring anything. If the same three projects are always amber, amber has become a comfortable place to sit. If nobody can open a project from the portfolio and see the tasks behind its status, the status is a claim, not a measurement.

Another sign is how leaders spend review meetings. When most of the time goes to asking whether a report is accurate, the organisation is paying for reports and getting doubt. When the time goes to deciding what to do about a problem everyone can already see, the portfolio view is doing its job.

The cost is in the decisions. Funding goes to projects that look healthy. Good people are moved from projects that look finished. And by the time a real problem reaches the board, the cheap options to fix it are gone.

How to prevent it

Let status come from the work. Progress should roll up from tasks to phases, from phases to projects, and from projects to the portfolio, without anyone retyping it. A late task should show on its phase the same day. And the portfolio view should let a leader go down from a red project to the very task that made it red, in a few clicks.

Finally, decide who sees what. A department head needs his department and those below it. A PMO needs the portfolio, read-only, across departments. A sponsor needs his own projects. When each person sees exactly his scope, built from the same work, nobody has to assemble a report for anyone else, and every number in the room comes from one place.

How ApprovedFlow does it

In ApprovedFlow progress rolls up from tasks to phases to the project, and from projects to the portfolio. A late task shows on its phase the same day. Department heads see their department's projects and those below, and the PMO sees the portfolio within the scope it is given. The status is the work, not a slide.

A question for you

If you had to name your three projects in trouble today, how sure would you be?